My sense was that if I didn’t answer the call to battle, the war would come to me anyway. This was a matter of destiny. If I gave destiny the finger and walked away, that wouldn’t be the end of it. What would have happened would still happen. The malevolent beings that I’d had a chance to stand up against would crush me without resistance. That was how fate worked. It wasn’t pretty. I had no desire to pull the sword Excalibur from the stone, but if I didn’t, the stone and the sword would roll downhill and flatten me.
